A reporter once asked Franklin Delano Roosevelt where he would locate the New Deal on the linear spectrum. The President of the United States smiled reassuringly, took a long puff on his trademark cigarette holder and replied, “Just a little bit left of center.”1
Fast-forward 80 years to the current struggle for power within the Democratic Party, which pits supporters of former nominee Hillary Clinton against forces loyal to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. What would happen if Sanders, who is constantly quoting Roosevelt yet still describes himself as a “progressive” and a “Democratic socialist,” were to take one more leaf from FDR’s book and start labeling his own programs “centrist”?
That would be ridiculous, of course. Quoting FDR is one thing; trying to win acceptance as a centrist is quite another. The very word contradicts both Sanders’s other self-designations. Clinton supporters would scoff or be apoplectic, or both. Everyone knows she is of the center while he is of the left. That’s like two plus two equals four; axiomatic. Indeed, many of her most prominent supporters believe the key reason she lost the election is that he pulled the party “too far left.” They are outspoken in their insistence that the party “return to the center” in order to reestablish itself as the majority party.2 Having espoused that position, they would likely view any effort on Sanders’s part to claim centrist status as a transparent, cynical attempt at manipulation. She is the centrist, he the leftist, end of discussion. Or is it?
The problem with such axiomatic thinking is that political labels don’t have fixed, clear or “correct” definitions. They are weapons, and, like all forms of weaponry, they are constantly evolving. They may have popularly accepted meanings from one electoral cycle to the next, but those are never static. Moreover, politicians are constantly competing to make their definitions the popularly accepted ones.3 The 2016 primary campaigns included repeated accusations that one candidate or another wasn’t a “real conservative” or a “real progressive.” During the Democratic debates Clinton not only insisted that she, too, was a progressive, but faulted Sanders for supposedly making himself the “gatekeeper” with respect to who qualified as one. Competition over labels is ubiquitous.
Just as popularly accepted meanings change, so does the popularity of a label. Eighty years ago the liberal label was the most popular label in the country. It was the chosen self-designation not only of President Roosevelt but of the great majority of members of Congress. Today, it is hard to find any prominent political figure willing to identify as a liberal. Ever since Ronald Reagan called it “the dreaded L-word,” the term is far more widely used as an epithet than as a self-designation. Indeed, the word “progressive” has re-emerged in recent years as a politically acceptable alternative to it.
Again, labels are not static. Their only constant feature is their political importance. They are what social scientists call “condensation symbols,” in that they condense a lot of information, as well as values and emotions, into a small, easily digested package. They provide what cognitive scientist George Lakoff calls “frames” for political discourse. In so doing, labels can either confer or deny political legitimacy. That is why politicians put so much time and energy into controlling their popularly accepted meanings. And that is why the current struggle for control of the Democratic Party is so heavily bound up with the labeling process.4
Why is it so important to Clinton supporters that they control the labeling process? Their reasoning is not subtle. To them, as to FDR, centrist means safe, reasonable, mainstream. It’s reassuring. President Eisenhower, one of the most underrated of American political strategists, didn’t use the word itself; he used a synonym. He called himself “middle of the road.” The middle of the road, he said, is the widest part; it’s where most Americans live.5 That is exactly how Clinton supporters relate to the centrist label.
By the same token, their labeling Sanders “left” performs a complementary function. In America, that term has likewise had a changing history, popular in the 1930s but anathema during the Cold War. It still carries a connotation of unsafe, fringe, unpredictable, authoritarian, even un-American. Sanders himself doesn’t use it. Even while calling himself a “Democratic socialist,” and taking great pains in his Georgetown University address to explain what he means by that term, he has nonetheless consistently avoided identifying as “left.” He clearly understands the negative implications of that label. So do the Clinton forces, which is why they constantly throw it at him and will continue to do so for as long as he does not challenge them on it.
Could Sanders make a credible claim to the centrist label, and if he could, what would he gain by it? From the outset of his candidacy, he emphasized that all of his key policy proposals have deep roots in both American history and the Democratic Party. Single-payer health care, free college tuition, a livable minimum wage, and an abiding concern for the environment are in his view all consonant with, indeed outgrowths of, the New Deal tradition. On a picket line with striking Verizon workers in New York City, he went so far as to recycle FDR’s line about welcoming the hatred of organized money.6
Equally important, throughout the campaign and especially in the debates, he repeatedly emphasized Clinton’s connections with Wall Street bankers, taunting her for refusing to release the texts of her Goldman Sachs speeches. The implication was clear; it was her coziness with big corporations rather than his agenda that represented a break with long-standing party traditions. Sanders’s position all along has been that his views represent the historic New Deal tradition of the party while it was the Clinton takeover that led to abandonment of that tradition and transformation of the Democratic Party into the “other” Wall Street party.
Sometimes Sanders has expressed himself in negative terms, suggesting that single-payer health care is “not all that radical.” On the positive side, his campaign website enthusiastically endorsed political scientist Peter Dreier’s description of him as “mainstream.”7 Indeed, the latter term has become a synonym for centrist in the same way as was Eisenhower’s phrase “middle of the road.” That being the case, however, what would Sanders gain by competing for the centrist label itself? Why isn’t “mainstream” sufficient?
There are situations in which synonyms suffice; they did for Eisenhower. There are others in which they do not, and this is pre-eminently one of those times. The late Murray Edelman described politics in terms of “mass arousal and quiescence.”8 After the turbulence of the Korean War and the rise of McCarthyism, Eisenhower’s purpose was quiescence. The reassuring phrase “middle of the road” was perfectly suited to that purpose.
Sanders is in the opposite situation. Just as his entire presidential campaign was an exercise in mass arousal, so too is his present effort to restructure and reform the Democratic Party. It is the Clinton forces that require quiescence in order to retain control of the party. Just as reform requires arousal, arousal in turn requires confrontation. That has been true of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, and it is true of what Sanders calls his “political revolution.” The vocabulary must match the purpose.
The word mainstream, while powerfully descriptive, is not itself inherently confrontational in the current situation. Thus far the Clinton forces have essentially managed to ignore it. By contrast, the very fact that those same forces have relied so heavily on the linear spectrum would make a direct challenge to Clinton’s custody of the centrist label much harder to ignore.
It is in this context that Sanders has an enormous amount to gain by opening up a direct competition for the centrist label. It would reinforce and make far more confrontational his claim to represent the authentic, historic New Deal mainstream of the Democratic Party, thereby undercutting the Clinton camp’s efforts to delegitimize him as “fringe.” It would reframe American political discourse itself by making his definition of progressivism the safe, reasonable version with which he already claims most Americans identify.
Equally important, it would turn the tables politically by utilizing the Clinton camp’s own vocabulary against it. If Clinton’s identification as a centrist immediately makes Sanders non-centrist, the same logic would apply if the roles were reversed. If he were to win custody of the centrist label, that would immediately raise the question, “If Sanders is centrist, then what is Clinton?” And what are all those DNC officials and corporate donors who make up her support system, and who currently control the party machinery?
That is exactly the debate Clinton supporters wish to avoid, because it would put the spotlight right on the question of where their true allegiances lie and where their financial dependency has led them politically. And if that in turn were to cost them the centrist label, then their own credentials as representatives of the party mainstream would no longer be secure.
In short, Sanders’s winning custody of the centrist label would immediately re-label Clinton and her supporters as rightist—that is, as non-mainstream within the Democratic Party. It would shift their dependence on corporate financial support from a side issue to a major issue—indeed the central issue—with respect to their own political identity. It would likewise spotlight the fact that it was during Bill Clinton’s presidency that the Democratic Party changed from a New Deal party to the “other” Wall Street party. The current leadership cannot afford such a label, and they would fight fiercely to keep it from sticking.
Could Sanders win such a confrontation? Is there any precedent for such a challenge succeeding? There is; indeed it resulted in the most important change in American political discourse in the 20th century. So far-reaching was the outcome that the position of the loser has been long forgotten.
The result of the 1932 election was a foregone conclusion. The country was in the worst depression in its history. The Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover, had already lost control of the House of Representatives two years earlier. The Democratic challenger, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ran a vigorous campaign but could probably have stayed on his front porch, as did William McKinley in 1896, and done as well. So totally discredited were the Republicans that Roosevelt not only was elected four times; he enjoyed Democratic majorities in both houses for his entire 12 years in office.
Of what relevance is the 1932 election to the current struggle for control of the Democratic Party? The answer lies in the political vocabulary of the time. If you ask people today who was the liberal candidate in 1932 and who the conservative, the response is as much a foregone conclusion as was the election itself: Roosevelt was the liberal, Hoover the conservative. But now let us look at the actual rhetoric of the campaign:
True liberalism is found not in striving to spread bureaucracy, but in striving to set bounds to it. True liberalism seeks all legitimate freedom first in the confident belief that without such freedom the pursuit of other blessings is in vain.
That’s not Roosevelt; that’s Hoover. It is a little-known but nonetheless significant fact that throughout his public career Hoover never identified as a conservative. He identified as an individualist, a progressive, and a liberal. Indeed, throughout the 1930s he kept up a futile and increasingly bitter rear-guard action to retain his identification as a liberal, and did not identify with the conservative label until after Roosevelt’s death in 1945, by which time his own political career had long since ended.9
That in turn raises a further question. Given that Roosevelt would have won anyway, why did he find it necessary to compete with Hoover for control of the liberal label? The answer, again, is not subtle. He wanted to change American political consciousness. He wanted not only the legitimacy that went with the liberal label, but the freedom of action such legitimacy would give him. In Lakoff’s terms, he wanted to reframe American political discourse, and he did so with brilliant effectiveness.
This is not to say that Roosevelt was a fraud or a hypocrite. He, too, had identified as a liberal throughout his public career, but he defined the word very differently from Hoover. And in 1932, with the country’s future hanging in the balance in an election that Hoover accurately predicted would be “deciding the direction our Nation will take over a century to come,” winning control of the national political vocabulary was as important as winning the election. After 1932, it would be Roosevelt’s definition of liberalism rather than Hoover’s that would shape the future of the country.10
That is exactly what is at stake in the current struggle for control of the Democratic Party. One vocabulary or another will prevail, and the one that prevails will determine the parameters of American politics for decades to come. Clinton supporters know it, which is precisely why retaining control of the labeling process is so important to them.
In this context one might venture a hypothetical question: If Roosevelt were alive today, what would he advise Sanders to do? Would he tell him to accept being labeled left and let Clinton retain control of the centrist label? Or would he tell Sanders to do what he himself did—namely, to seize the most legitimizing label of the day, not hypocritically but as a key aspect of his struggle to change political consciousness and thereby advance what Sanders himself calls a “political revolution”?
The question answers itself. And therein lies the basis for what may, or may not, become the defining struggle not only for the Democratic Party but for the future of the nation.
1The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939 (Macmillan, 1941), p. 556.
2See, for example, Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, “Back to the Center, Democrats,” New York Times, July 6, 2017.
3For a more extended treatment of this theme, see David Green, The Language of Politics in America: Shaping Political Consciousness from McKinley to Reagan (Cornell University Press, 1991), chapter 1.
4On condensation symbols see Green, “A Call to Linguistic Disobedience,” The American Interest (July/August 2012). On “frames,” see Lakoff, The Political Mind (Viking, 2008), especially chapters 7, 8.
5On Eisenhower’s use of “middle of the road,” see Green, The Language of Politics in America, chapter 7.
6A video of the Georgetown speech can be found here.
7See Peter Dreier, “Bernie is Mainstream,” Huffington Post, March 11, 2016.
8Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (Markham, 1971).
9For Hoover’s 1932 defense of “true liberalism,” see Green, Language of Politics in America, pp. 109–10. For his efforts throughout the 1930s to retain identification with the liberal label and his belated, reluctant acceptance of the conservative label, see chapter 5, passim.
10For Hoover’s prediction, see Green, Language of Politics, p. 118.